Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
Search by MSP
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
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Displaying 1177 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
I think that Greg McLardie was also hoping to come in.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
Professor Schafer, for the sake of completeness, have you any thoughts on the things that we might be capturing inadvertently? What safeguards might we need to guard against that?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
Right at the beginning, you hit on something that caused me concern. If someone creates a document that has some sort of version control mechanism that shows whose hands it has passed through, are they inadvertently creating something that will be captured by the bill? I am just checking that we are in the same terrain.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
I would be disappointed if you weren’t.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
I will bring in Mr McLardie in a moment, because I know that he is keen to come in.
The bill creates such things but says nothing about how and when they might be exchanged. Whether we like it or not, the ownership and exchange of such things look quite different from the ownership and exchange of regular property. We are bringing them into property law, but we are not setting out how they might be handled, used or exchanged, despite the fact that they are different. We are inadvertently bringing things into property law and then saying nothing about how they should be handled. Is that a fair summary?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
Great. With that we will end the public part of our meeting. I thank all our witnesses for another very interesting and insightful set of contributions. It has been a hugely helpful session. You have given us a huge amount to go away and think about.
11:02 Meeting continued in private until 11:30.Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
I love the principle that the law should not enable people to be more stupid than they have to be—we could almost leave the evidence session there. However, I will bring in my colleague, Willie Coffey.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
I do not think that the bill is intended to capture PDFs, but I am thinking about PDFs that arise from an electronic system and that contain some sort of record—I am quite sure that people could come up with some clever way of embedding that—and over which there are contested claims. Let us be clear that, as we have heard, the immutability test is not absolutely concrete. At the end of the day, we are just talking about electrons sitting on hard disks, so, rather than it being a hard practical thing that is unalterable in any way, it is a case of notional or theoretical immutability.
Does that mean that the PDFs themselves could become electronic property or digital assets? Is that what you are saying?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
I am simply saying that, all of a sudden, it could be argued that a system that has been created out of PDFs, which people might think are a world away from what we are talking about, would meet the criteria that are set out in the bill. Is that the case?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Daniel Johnson
It is probably fair to say that, given what previous witnesses have said, the point is not necessarily to avoid litigation but to have some sort of hook or purchase should that occur. Is that a fair observation?
